Posts Tagged ‘friendship’

It all started more than 15 years ago. I’d just left the nonprofit community development corporation I co-founded in 1974. I’d met Meg (Wheatley) through some of the Y2K work my colleague Robert Theobald and I were doing. She invited me to her home in Sundance for a weekend of exploring patterns in our lives and work. It was like a meeting of old souls and we formed an intention to work together.

Dinner at our place, hanging out by the fire, let’s do lunch, a drink after work: these are often some of the sweetest times in our days. Sometimes they are planned and other times spontaneous. Sometimes they are quiet and sometimes raucous. Sometimes they are for serious conversations and sometimes they are for letting go.

What if we made these kinds of gatherings an intentional practice? Intentional in the sense of meeting regularly, at an agreed upon time, for an agreed upon duration, with an agreed upon purpose. What if we committed to each other to keep showing up? That we wouldn’t leave the group for a specified period of time, at least long enough to experience the best and the worst of each other. In these gatherings, we could practice being in authentic relationship with each other with our whole selves.